Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Vail again

It's another day off in Vail, and the more adventuresome of us are hitting the slopes again. It snowed yesterday, the place looks like a Currier and Ives illustration which would be fine except that it's March and 65 degrees at home.

In my attempts to make my time seem like it's been spent in a worthwhile manner in this winter wonderland, I constructed two lasagnes for an upcoming dinner. One's a meaty one, the other is spinachy. I had to do a little improvising on the recipe I used since my trip to the grocery was slightly incomplete, I find, expensive as it seemed at the time. Well, they look great; hope they taste good too.

At two, our little exercise group assembled silently in the fitness plaza, taking our places at the various machines in the room. A couple of the machines, treadmills and stairsteppers, are so tall that the ceiling panels above them have been removed to accommodate even the most average among us in height:

You get a great view of the spray insulation and some of the wiring in the place while you exercise!

I ached terribly yesterday from starting up using a machine that exercises my upper arms. My friend and fitness mentor had suggested some years ago that it was really about the repetitions rather than the actual weight that's being moved around. So yesterday, I forgot all about that and tried to do repetitions with the weight on 30 pounds. It was, to say the least, not very repetitive.

Today, I tried it again, but with the weight on 10 pounds. I was able to do six repetitions of ten each on that machine, then I used the one for my upper legs and did the same amount with the same weight there.

The treadmills were in use when I got there, so after I'd caught my wind, I went to one of the stair steppers, plopped right in front of a television set. I'd never seen Charmed before. Someone had thoughtfully put the closed captioning on, although it was in an eight-point typeface from where I was pumping along. So I watched people zapping other people with light balls while I jammed along to Underworld and Jimmy "Bo" Horne.

I did about twenty five minutes on that contraption, then I got on the treadmill for twenty more minutes. I had to get back upstairs and change out of my embarrassing borrowed shorts. As a Tarheel, I feel great chagrin at having to advertise for the other team, but I don't think that my jeans would work as well as these disloyal togs.

Again, I'm thrilled that I've gotten started, as much of a baby step as this has been. To quote Leonard Cohen, "I ache in the places where I used to play."